The TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

The leading international forum for literary culture

October 10, 2013

In this week’s TLS – a note from the Deputy Editor

How can one restore justice to Danilo
Kiš? – is the question that preoccupies Kiš’s fellow novelist Adam
Thirlwell this week, though the “comprehensive, erudite and stylish
biography” he reviews might be a start. Kiš, born in 1935 in what was then
Yugoslavia, dying in exile in Paris at the age of fifty-four, of lung cancer
(“a man writes so that he can smoke”, he said), was one of a
“great global generation” of writers that includes Thomas Bernhard, Milan
Kundera, Thomas Pynchon and Mario Vargas Llosa – but unlike them he has “no
global existence”. Yet he is, we hear, “necessary for a future literature ”.
This week’s issue, coinciding with the Frankfurt Book Fair where so many
writers’ global existence has begun, pays special attention to literature in
foreign languages, some already translated into English and some yet to be:
the letters of Julio Cortázar, that show his progression from respected
author to intellectual hot property; a new and “different kind of” biography
of Georg Büchner; Albert
Camus’s Algerian Chronicles, “both timeless and timely”; The
Arrière-Pays by Yves Bonnefoy (“the French expression has been
retained, with the author’s approval, for want of an adequate English
equivalent”); essays by W. G. Sebald and Alexander Herzen (for the first
time, anglophone readers can hear “all Herzen’s voices speak for
themselves”).

Thomas Pynchon’s new novel is full of “period detail”, the period being the
recent past – the spring of 2001, “the moment just after the bursting of the
dotcom bubble” – and the place New York, whose immediate future is
foreknown. Lidija Haas enjoys the book’s “vast, paranoiac set of systems,
the everything-is-connected, nothing-is-what-it-seems quality”. Lydia
Wilson, meanwhile, salutes The Library of Arabic Literature, a remarkable
project of editing, translating and publishing that will do for pre-modern
Arabic texts what the famous Loeb Library has done for the Classics, and
promises to “revolutionize” the study of medieval Arabic thought and
literary creativity.